71–79 of 79 posts
She had a recent interview[1] where she claimed she's actively working on her research behind bars and still wants the opportunity to change the world with her invention. This is not a coincidence at all. [ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yw_xyGbUNZ0&pp=ygUWZWxpemFiZXR... ]
I understand that justice is for sale in Washington these days.
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That was implication of the original con. She was this superstar Stanford undergrad who’d discovered something so radically important she had to drop out of school for the sake of humanity.
She wasn't a "superstar" in any way whatsoever. She dropped out after 1 year of undergrad, with zero papers published where she was a principal author, or anything that would even hint that she knew what she was doing. She was rich and connected so was able to get funding on the basis of not much more than a powerpoint and a couple of supportive professors.
I looked over her bio on Wikipedia. Yeah, she certainly came from a rich + connected background. So she understood rich people and what they wanted to hear. However, I don't think her Stanford professors were implicated, at least as far as I've read. They didn't knock any sense into her but they also didn't co-sign.
But none of the adults raised alarm. I got into it once with a VC trying to say that Sand Hill was blameless. That was nonsense too.
If its possible to keep creating and rug pulling new shitcoins, then it seems obvious that the same can be done with medical start-ups. What a weird world we are living in.
Billy McFarland, famed "entrepreneur" behind Fyre Fest got out of jail and immediately announced plans for raising funds for Fyre Fest 2. Apparently there are enough suckers to go around, so why not just copy/paste the original scam instead of doing the work of tweaking it to boost legitimacy? https://www.biography.com/crime/a63917214/billy-mcfarland-no...
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1: they were never married 2: why is lover so bad? I see the hate in this discussion for the phrase, but I don't get it. Is it some modern thing where we're supposed to separate the concept of marriage from sex due to asexual types or some such? legitimate question : I don't get it. I'm more than willing to avoid the use of lover, but someone at least explain it to me. would more casual concepts like 'defacto' or 'co…
To a native English speaker, the term "lover" here has an unnecessary sexual connotation, which is a silly thing to highlight. They are married (supposedly), and thus he is her husband.
This title is ridiculous. He's Holmes's husband, not her "lover". They were married in 2019.
Technically they never married, which is why the original article uses a bunch of other phrases to describe their relationship, but agreed that the change from "partner" to "lover" makes the title needlessly provocative. "Partner" was fine.
Oxford actually has (as one of three definitions):
either member of a married couple or of an established unmarried couple. "she lived with her partner"
a person with whom one has sex; a lover. "make sure that you or your partner are using an effective method of contraception"
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To a native English speaker, the term "lover" here has an unnecessary sexual connotation, which is a silly thing to highlight. They are married (supposedly), and thus he is her husband.
Seems that Americans have a very weird 'love and hate' relationship to anything related to sex.
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That is not unique to fund managers. Second time entrepreneurs are more likely to raise capital even if their first venture failed and spectacularly so. Adam Neumann got funded by a16z(their largest?) despite all the governance issues at Wework , there are many other examples of high profile and regular entrepreneurs getting funding .
The difference is that Neumann didn't attempt to conceal his scam in the slightest, and more importantly, he didn't break any laws, just screwed over his investors.
> didn't break any laws,
To VCs, I would imagine the first is bigger disqualification than the second.
Startups are modeled around breaking laws to disrupt all the time. Ask for forgiveness than permission mentality.
Uber and Airbnb did it with taxi, breaking privacy laws in Europe by ad supported tech or fintech with AML/KYC securities law or more recently on copyright law to build their training data by ai companies . All of these depend on law being broken to succeed.
Calculating the risk of prosecution and the size of the penalty with upside of doing it anyway happens in these companies all the time.